Yateley in the Great War

By Peter J. Tipton

There were fewer than 500 houses in Yateley in WWI but with Aldershot, Farnborough, Camberley and Sandhurst close by, this Hampshire villages response to the call to arms was more prepared than most, and punched above its weight.Using contemporary evidence from many sources researched by our local history team, the Yateley Society recreates the impact of the War on our predecessors. The story of the men who left Yateley to fight -- territorials, regulars, volunteers and conscripts -- is told alongside that of the battalions of Kitcheners New Armies training in trench warfare on Yateley Common. At the same time, in the three private houses forming the Yateley Military Hospital, Yateley women of all ages were tending wounded soldiers.With its intimate glimpses into village life, this book, will fascinate anyone with Yateley connections. The names of many families in the village of 100 years ago are here, while for recent newcomers with perhaps a Victorian or Edwardian house there may be clues to the history of your homes.With its many illustrations and maps, this exploration of the social network, and social consequences of the Great War on a small community in North East Hampshire has interest for historians and general readers alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781473876545

Book preview

Introduction

In the early 1600s, Yateley men were being mustered as non-professional soldiers, just as their Territorial Army successors would be at their annual training camps on the eve of the Great War. Scanning down the rolls of men attending the muster on 6 September 1625, a familiar surname, Shakespeare, catches the eye. Not the Shakespeare, just a namesake. John ‘Shackspeere’ was mustered as a ‘muskettere’ for Mr Beverly Britten who lived at Yateley Hall (then known as Calcotts). In 1914, in a remarkable coincidence of symmetry, another Shakespeare lived in Yateley. William Shakspeare was living at Yateley Hall Farm. He was the local Hampshire County Councillor, and he and his family will play a prominent role in our story of the Great War. There had been no other Shakespeares living in Yateley in the intervening 300 years.

The name William Cave also connects the 1625 muster with Yateley in the First World War. In 1625, William Cave lived in Monteagle House, then known as Brickhills. He was Clerk to the Auditor for Wales; today we would call him a senior civil servant. He had to provide one-third of a musketeer for the 1625 muster. On 13 September 1918, his direct male heir, William Sturmy Cave, was awarded the DSO for gallantry whilst serving with the 2/4th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment at Havrincourt in France. In 1914, F company of the 4th Hants was based at the Drill Hall in Yateley. Captain Cave’s father was Colonel Sir Thomas Sturmy Cave KCB, who had joined the Yateley Volunteers just after the unit had been founded in 1860 by Captain George Mason of Yateley Manor.

Perhaps it was the centuries of military tradition in Yateley, perhaps the proximity to Sandhurst and Aldershot, or perhaps it was because some of the principal residents, like George Mason, had fought in the Napoleonic Wars which caused the residents of Yateley to take such a robust view of the perceived threat of invasion by Napoleon III in 1860. Whatever the reason, Yateley was one of the first villages in Hampshire to form a volunteer company, and this one event was crucial in determining one of the key roles Yateley would play in the Great War.

Marriage of William Shakspeare to Sheila Marion Kirkpatrick at St Peter’s, Yateley, on 23 April 1913. All the village girls were invited to be bridesmaids. Father of the bride was Brigadier General William Johnston Kirkpatrick. The groom was a major in the 3rd (Reserve) Battalion, North Staffordshire Regiment. His father, also William Shakspeare, was a director of Messrs James & Shakspeare of the London Metal Exchange, and County Councillor for Hartley Wintney Rural District. The groom’s mother organized the local committee to support Belgian Refugees. (Jean McIlwaine)

During the Haldane Reforms of 1906-1912, which transformed the Army’s Volunteer Battalions into the modern Territorial Army, Sir Thomas Sturmy Cave had been one of the key advisors to the War Office. In 1920, when Yateley War Memorial was erected in a prime position on the green opposite Yateley’s parish church, it was the daughters of George Mason who gave part of their front garden to be its site.

Yateley’s War Memorial does not cover the whole civil parish, and the extent of the civil parish in 1919 was not exactly the same as it is today. For the modern reader, some explanation is needed of the two neighbourhoods within Yateley Civil Parish and the character of its near neighbours.

Our account of Yateley in the Great War will cover the Civil Parish of Yateley as it was then, and will explain why the 4th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment played such a large part, and why so many of the names on the Yateley War Memorial served in that battalion. To explain why, when war was declared, there were also so many Yateley men already serving in the regular Army, or who were immediately called-up as Reservists, we must look at local geography and the population of immediately neighbouring towns and villages.

Yateley and its Neighbours

Yateley is a parish in the far north-east corner of Hampshire, now bounded by the River Blackwater to its north and the A30 to the south. From medieval times, the ancient parish had been much larger in area, with three tithings: the village of Yateley (called the Inner Tithing) and the two outer tithings of Hawley and Cove. In the nineteenth century, both Hawley and Cove had become new ecclesiastical parishes, with their own new churches. In medieval times, Minley was in a different Hundred from Yateley, but was still included in Yateley parish. From Saxon times, Hampshire was divided in Hundreds, which were replaced by District Councils in 1894. After 1894, Minley was part of the Civil Parish of Hawley.

A few miles east of Yateley on the A30 were the Royal Military College in Sandhurst, Berkshire, and the Staff College in Camberley, Surrey. Today, the whole site is the Royal Military Academy, and the Staff College has relocated. A few miles to the south-east of Yateley are Farnborough, where Colonel Cody made the first manned flight in Britain in 1908, and Aldershot, the ‘Home of the British Army’. With such close military neighbours, it could be expected that the people of Yateley would play a significant role in the Great War.

Surrounded by urban expansion, most of it military, Yateley was slowly changing, but in 1914 it would have appeared to be a small rural village dominated by large mansion houses. Yateley still retained the characteristics of the scattered heathland settlement it had always been, although it had greatly shrunk to just over 3,000 acres when its ancient tithings had been hived off as separate parishes. As in medieval times, the main community would still have appeared to be the buildings lining the common land we now call Yateley Green. The parish church, the manor house and the inns lie at the eastern end of Yateley Green, which then widens into a large expanse of common land to the west.

Colonel Samuel Franklin Cody had been the first man to fly an aeroplane in Britain, on 16 October 1908. On 7 August 1913, he was flying his new Cody Floatplane with Hampshire cricketer William Evans as a passenger. The plane had been designed and built by Cody as an entrant in the Daily Mail Circuit of Britain Race. The plane suffered a structural failure at 200ft. Cody and Evans, who were not strapped in, were both killed. An estimated 100,000 people attended Cody’s funeral in Aldershot. (Malcolm Miller)

Away from this historical core, large mansions had been built, most having their own home farms and cottages for their staff. We shall look at these in some detail because the families who owned them dominated both the war effort on the home front and provided the officers and nurses serving on the front lines. Many of their gardeners and stable lads served as ‘other ranks’.

Within the civil parish, the small hamlets of Cricket Hill, Darby Green and Frogmore lie where there has always been land good enough to cultivate. Each hamlet had its pubs and small shops.

The position of the new Cricket Pavilion was decided by George Higgs, proprietor of the White Lion and a keen cricketer. This illustration shows the opening ceremony in 1909. The pavilion was built on Yateley Green, now registered common land. The modern Tithings stands on its footprint. (Jean McIlwaine)

The area of the parish was then 3,222 acres, of which about one-third was Yateley Common, poor heathland on which armies had trained and held manoeuvres for centuries. In the past this heathland had extended much further, all over the ancient parish of Yateley, and well into Surrey, Berkshire and other nearby parishes of Hampshire. It was this vast tract of heathland, then commons, which attracted the Army to establish its headquarters at Aldershot in 1854. Most of the common land in the region was gradually requisitioned to provide land for barracks, ranges and manoeuvres. Although Yateley Common was used extensively by the Army, none of it was purchased by the Government until they acquired Minley Manor in 1936.

In 1851, Aldershot and Farnborough were tiny hamlets with populations of 875 and 477 respectively; by 1911, the Urban District of Aldershot had a population of 20,155, and Farnborough had 14,199. Aldershot, 9 miles from Yateley, was the largest town in this area of Hampshire, the larger town of Reading being only 12 miles away in Berkshire. Camberley owes its existence to the establishment of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst in 1812, built in Berkshire exactly where the three counties of Berkshire, Surrey and Hampshire meet. The community which grew up to service the RMC was established along the old coaching road to Exeter. In 1911, the parish of Frimley with Camberley had a population of 13,673. Just 4 miles away from Yateley church, Camberley was Yateley’s nearest town with comparable shopping and banks, but was then only two-thirds the size of Yateley today.

The main Exeter Road crossing Yateley Common, westbound after leaving Blackwater. Known as the Hartford Bridge Flats in the First World War, the common was completely devoid of trees, making it ideal for infantry training. (Jean McIlwaine)

During the First World War, Yateley’s population (1,879) was similar to that of Hawley (1,736) but smaller than Hartley Wintney (2,172) and Odiham (2,674), and much smaller than Sandhurst (3,265). Fleet (3,281) had already been created an Urban District in 1904. Of the parishes surrounding Yateley, only Eversley (841) and Finchampstead (866) were smaller.

The Civil Parish of Yateley itself was essentially a parish of two halves, the dividing line being decided differently by different institutions, as still happens today. The national census divided the parish east and west of Cricket Hill: western Yateley was called ‘the village’ and had a population of 892; the eastern half, which included Frogmore, Darby Green and Starve Acre, had a slightly larger population of 987.

The ecclesiasical authorities placed the dividing line differently. By an Order in Council gazetted on 15 March 1901, numbers eighty-one to 109 on the schedule of the 1901 census within the Civil Parish of Yateley were transferred to the Ecclesiastical Parish of Holy Trinity Hawley. These properties transferred to Holy Trinity can conveniently be called Frogmore, as they included two of Yateley’s five largest mansion houses, Frogmore Park and Hurstleigh. Today, Darby Green lies in the recently created Ecclesiastical Parish of St Barnabas. During the Great War, this hamlet was in the Parish of St Peter’s Yateley, although it did already have its own ‘tin church’ on Darby Green.

During the First World War, the Post Office authorities chose to give all houses in Yateley the postal address of ‘Yateley Camberley Surrey’, and this continued until the 1990s. But in the First World War, the Post Office gave the houses in Frogmore, Darby Green and Starve Acre just their street address or house name, followed by ‘Blackwater Camberley Surrey’, or sometimes just ‘Camberley, Surrey’. This is very confusing for anyone searching military records for men who lived in Hampshire in the eastern part of the Civil Parish of Yateley, as the postal address was used for most records, and most men stated their address as ‘Blackwater, Camberley, Surrey’ or just ‘Camberley, Surrey’. As this book covers the Civil Parish of Yateley in the Great War, we should confirm at the outset that the number of Yateley men killed in the war was far higher than those on Yateley’s War Memorial. The forty-two names on the memorial were associated with families only in St Peter’s Ecclesiastical Parish

The Prelude to War

The story of any community is the story of the families who have lived there. The buildings in which they lived, worked, learned and relaxed provide the continuity to the story of the community over time, because the families living in the houses, or using the buildings, change over time. Those living in the community collectively create institutions to enable and order community life. Governments impose institutions and laws for national and regional purposes. In a time of war, local people will find that national interests have taken over their lives. The Great War was a time of great change. In the small village of Yateley, some families who were living in Yateley in 1914 had moved away by 1919, so the names of their loved ones are not recorded on Yateley’s memorials. The story of Yateley in the Great War is best anchored in the buildings in which families either continued to live, or moved into and out of during the war.

The story of Yateley in the Great War is told in these terms: the families, the buildings and the local institutions in which they were educated, worshipped, left behind to serve on the war front, or to serve as volunteers to sustain the war effort.

Little Croft, built before the First World War on Handford Lane, was replaced by a cul-de-sac of modern houses at the bottom of Tudor Drive. John Hautenville Cope and his wife E.E. Thoyts rented the house in 1910. They both contributed to the Hampshire edition of the Victoria County History published in 1911. During the Great War, Mrs Agnes Edith Gulland, a widow, lived there. Her two sons were Army officers. She placed an obituary in the Reading Mercury after Captain John Perfect Gulland of the 69th Punjabis was reported killed. Luckily, he survived as a Prisoner of War. This postcard was sent on 23 December 1913 by Hugh Gardner to his mother in Hankow, China. He boarded at Little Croft throughout his schooldays until he joined the RAF in 1918 as a Cadet Pilot. (Malcolm Miller)

A volume of the Victoria County History for Hampshire was published in 1911. This provides a short contemporary description of Yateley, but only mentions six buildings: the Manor House, Yateley Hall, Frogmore Park, Monteagle Farm, the parish church and the Dog & Partridge Inn. Four sets of historical records for the years 1910 and 1911 provide an ideal starting point to analyse the houses and their occupiers in the Edwardian heyday before the outbreak of the Great War. These four are the 1911 census, the 1910 Land Tax Assessment, Kelly’s Directory and the Ordnance Survey map.

Of the thirty largest houses in Yateley in 1911, twenty-three still had their original occupants living in them in 1914. These twenty-three houses represent only 7 per cent of the total of 440 occupied dwellings in the civil parish. Because many of these large houses also had lodges, inhabited stables, gardeners’ cottages and other estate houses for their employees, these mansions dominated life in the parish by their physical presence, the employment they provided, the customers they represented to local tradesmen, the farms they owned and the leading roles assumed by their families in parish governance and affairs.

The 1911 census, the latest to be released under the 100-year rule, was the first census completed by the householders themselves, recording the number of rooms in the house as well as all the usual details of their families. Kelly’s Directory of 1911 divides these heads of households into three categories: private residents (the gentry), commercial (tradesmen and farmers) and the rest whom Kelly’s does not list. The assessment for the 1910 Land Tax describes each house in great detail, listing the uses of each room, and even the state of repair of the whole building. A copy of the 1910 Ordnance Survey was heavily annotated by the Land Tax assessors, enabling modern researchers to locate each house exactly and to see which land was then being divided up for future development.

The picture of the village as it prepared for the possibility of war is very complete, and provides the dramatis personae for the opening scenes of Yateley in the Great War.

Houses and Families before the War

Anyone attending school in the 1950s might believe that the operation of the Elizabethan Poor Laws, with its settlement certificates, had resulted in populations of English rural villages remaining static, with little movement of families over three centuries. In 1905, in his History of Crondall and Yateley, the Vicar of Yateley devoted an appendix to examining the surnames found in church and manorial documents over the centuries, and concluded that twenty-one surnames had survived from seventy years previously. He noted that at least